Observations of M56
These are the observations available for M56. If you have any of your own that you'd like to submit we'd love to put them on the website.
-
M56 in Lyra
I'm continuing my observations of globular clusters so this is Messier 56 in Lyra.
Charles Messier found M56 on the 19th March 1779, on the same night he also discovered a comet. He reobserved M56 on the 23rd March and noted that it was a
nebula without a star and little light close to a 10th magnitude star
. Five years later, John Herschel succeeded in resolving this globular cluster into individual stars. He described M56 as afine compressed cluster, inclining to a triangular form, brighter towards the middle, with stars of 12th to 14th magnitude
.
This image of M56 was provided by David Davies and taken from Cambridge in the UK. To see more of David's work please visit his Flickr Photostream. Click on the image for the larger version. M56 has a very eccentric orbit around the galactic centre taking it from a few thousand light-years of the galactic centre out to 40,000 light years from the centre. M56 is currently 27,000 light-years from us as it traverses the outer half of its orbit. It has around 200,000 solar masses and is just one third the size of M13. The 25 brightest stars have an average magnitude of 15.3. Notable is the 10th magnitude blue-white star to the west (right side) which was noted by Messier.
Image Details
- Telescope: 8" Ritchey-Chretien at F/8.2
- Camera: QSI 583 wsg and Lodestar guide camera
- Mount: Skywatcher EQ6
This is an RGB image with five 5-minute exposures per colour captured on 5-6 August 2018.
David Davies - (17 September 2018).
